Consent Before Content: Why I’m Changing How I Share Photographs of Children

A camera can preserve a childhood expression for generations. A public upload can remove that same image from the family's control in seconds.

Photographers have always carried responsibilities that extend beyond exposure, composition, and delivery. We decide what is framed, what is retained, what is shown, and what remains private. When the person in the photograph is a child, those decisions deserve a higher standard than a release was signed, so publication is allowed.

That is why I am changing how I handle identifiable photographs of children. I will continue to make meaningful photographs for families and organizations, but those images will remain private and will not be used in my public galleries, portfolio, advertising, or social-media promotion.

This is not a promise to remove children from photography. Children deserve to be documented as part of families, communities, celebrations, and real life. It is a promise to separate the act of making a photograph from the much larger act of publishing it.

The court ruling behind the alarm

A widely shared social-media post recently claimed that a federal court had effectively made it legal for anyone to take a child's public photograph and turn it into abusive AI material. The underlying case is real. That summary is not an accurate description of what the court decided.

In _United States v. Steven Anderegg_, decided August 25, 2026, the Seventh Circuit considered charges involving obscene, wholly AI-generated depictions of fictional minors. Applying existing Supreme Court precedent—particularly Stanley v. Georgia and Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition—the court affirmed the dismissal of one charge concerning private possession in the home.

The ruling was narrow. It did not erase the remaining production and distribution charges. It did not announce that every use of a real child's photograph is lawful. It did not legalize exploitation, solicitation, distribution, or material depicting an identifiable real child. The opinion itself reflects the difficult gap between older constitutional precedent and newer technology.

None of that makes the broader concern imaginary. It means the concern should be stated accurately. Fear spreads quickly when the claim is absolute; responsible policy has to survive after the viral caption is corrected.

The risk does not depend on one court case

The essential problem is simpler: once an identifiable photograph is publicly accessible, the photographer and family cannot control every copy, screenshot, scrape, repost, dataset, or manipulation that may follow.

The UK's National Crime Agency has warned that offenders are increasingly exploiting openly available photographs of children to create realistic sexualized material. The agency and Internet Watch Foundation reported finding 3,440 AI-generated child sexual-abuse videos in 2025, compared with 13 in 2024. Those figures describe illegal abuse material, not ordinary family photography, but they demonstrate how quickly the technical capacity is expanding.

UNICEF has called for governments to criminalize the creation, procurement, possession, and distribution of AI-generated child sexual-abuse material; for AI developers to build stronger safeguards; and for digital platforms to prevent circulation rather than merely react after harm occurs.

Photographers cannot solve that system alone. We can still reduce unnecessary exposure and make publication a deliberate choice rather than an automatic business practice.

A legal release and an ethical decision are not identical

Traditional photography agreements often contain broad model-release language. A client checks yes, and the photographer may use images across a website, social media, advertising, competitions, samples, and publications. The language is efficient. It is also too easy to treat every permitted use as an equally good idea.

Permission answers may this be published? Ethics asks more questions:

• Does this particular image need to be public?
• Is the child identifiable?
• What context appears beside the photograph?
• Does the image reveal a school, location, schedule, medical condition, family circumstance, or other unnecessary detail?
• Would the child reasonably feel respected by the image later?
• Is publication serving the family, the work, or merely the photographer's need for content?
• Can the same purpose be served by a detail, silhouette, distant scene, or image without an identifiable face?

A signature cannot make those questions disappear. It gives the photographer more responsibility, not less.

My updated policy

My website now states the standard publicly so families do not have to discover it inside contract language.

• Identifiable child images remain private. They will not appear in my public galleries, portfolio, advertising, or social-media promotion.
• Adult permission does not override this rule. A model release or guardian signature will not authorize public promotional use of an identifiable child’s photograph.
• Private service remains available. Families and organizations will still receive child photographs through access-controlled delivery.
• The rule does not change service. Privacy will never reduce coverage, editing, image quality, or private delivery.
• Existing public images are being removed. Previously indexed, shared, archived, downloaded, or copied material may not be fully retractable.

The complete operating policy is available on my Privacy & Image Use page.

Why I am stating this publicly

People may remember child photographs that appeared in my work before this policy changed. Those images were shared before the recent ruling brought renewed attention to public-image risks and under the permissions and standards in effect at that time. They are being removed from channels I control and do not represent my policy going forward.

This statement is not meant to sensationalize a narrow court decision or suggest that every family photograph will inevitably be abused. It is a clear operational boundary: preserving a family’s memories does not require publishing a child’s face.

Children are people, not portfolio material

The most important shift is conceptual. A child is not a marketing asset represented by an adult signature. A child is a person whose image will outlive the session, the campaign, the current platform, and perhaps the photographer's ability to control where it travels.

This does not mean childhood must disappear from visual history. Family photography matters precisely because children change so quickly and because ordinary relationships deserve to be remembered. The answer is not to stop making meaningful photographs. It is to become more careful about the distance between preserving a memory and publishing a face.

Good photography depends on trust. A family should never have to trade privacy for beautiful work, and a photographer should never confuse the ability to publish with an obligation to do so.

Consent comes before content. Judgment comes after consent. Both are necessary.

Sources

United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. (2026). United States v. Steven Anderegg, No. 25-1354. https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/USCOURTS-ca7-25-01354

National Crime Agency. (2026). New guidance for parents and carers as AI-manipulated images of children become a growing concern. https://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/news/new-guidance-for-parents-and-carers-as-ai-manipulated-images-of-children-become-a-growing-concern

UNICEF USA. UNICEF urges action to protect children from AI-generated sexual content. https://www.unicefusa.org/stories/unicef-urges-action-protect-children-ai-generated-sexual-content

UNICEF Innocenti. (2025). Guidance on AI and Children 3.0. https://www.unicef.org/innocenti/reports/policy-guidance-ai-children